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Episode cover_Suneera Madhani_Leveraging AI for Business Insights
10 July 202435 min

Leveraging AI for Business Insights with Suneera Madhani, Worth AI

with Suneera Madhani, Worth AI
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There’s a moment in every entrepreneur’s journey when clarity hits, and for many, it’s realizing the potential of data-driven business insights. This week, I’m excited to have this conversation with Suneera Madhani, the founder of Stax and CEO School, who used it to predict market trends, understand customer behavior, and streamline operations. This strategic shift propelled her ventures to success and now guides the growth of her current fintech enterprise Worth AI.

About Suneera Madhani

Suneera Madhani‘s entrepreneurial journey began with her founding Stax (formerly Fattmerchant), a revolutionary payment platform she grew from a fledgling idea to processing over $5 billion in payments. Her innovative approach to blending technology with financial services not only transformed how small businesses manage transactions but also was got her recognised by Entrepreneur Magazine among the 100 Most Influential Women.

A recipient of many accolades, including a spot on Fortune’s prestigious 40 under 40 list, Suneera is driven by a passion for empowering women in business. Her commitment extends beyond her ventures, as she continually seeks ways to help women entrepreneurs have it all. Today, Suneera leads Worth AI, leveraging artificial intelligence to further innovate business operations.

Challenging Assumptions with Data-Driven Business Insights

I know firsthand that relying on assumptions in business can be risky, even though entrepreneurs are known to have strong gut feelings. Assumptions can lead to misunderstanding your customers, overlooking opportunities, or sticking with ineffective strategies.

Switching to data-driven business insights is like turning on the lights. Here’s what happens:

  • Clear View: Data reveals the true state of your market and operations, helping you see what’s really happening.
  • Testing Ideas: Before committing resources, you can use data to experiment and validate your strategies.
  • Quick Adjustments: With ongoing data feedback, you can tweak your approach fast, staying aligned with customer needs and market changes.
  • Forecasting Trends: Business insights help you predict future demands, preparing you better for upcoming shifts.
  • Personalized Offerings: Insights into customer preferences allow you to tailor your products and marketing, enhancing customer satisfaction.

Choosing data-based insights over assumptions allows you to make smarter, more informed decisions, positioning your business for success based on facts, not guesses.

Suneera’s best advice for entrepreneurs:

“If you can do it once, you can do it better.”

Episode highlights:

  • Don’t Skip Data Standardization. Standardize the data collection and analysis processes across your business to ensure consistency and accuracy. This makes it easier to compare metrics over time, leading to more informed decision-making and improved strategic planning.
  • Focus on Execution. Put extra effort into the practical implementation of ideas and plans. Effective execution involves monitoring progress, making timely adjustments, and holding the team accountable, which are crucial for turning visions into reality and achieving business goals.
  • Be Intentional with Growth Strategies. Clearly define your growth objectives and develop targeted strategies to achieve them. This includes identifying key markets, setting measurable goals, and allocating resources strategically to maximize ROI and sustain long-term growth.
  • Simplify Business Processes. Look for ways to simplify operations to improve efficiency and reduce costs. This could involve cutting unnecessary steps, automating tasks, or reorganizing teams to better align with your business goals.
  • Empower and Inspire Teams. Foster a supportive and motivating work environment that encourages innovation and collaboration. Empowered teams with a clear sense of purpose and commitment are more likely to contribute positively to the business’s success and adapt quickly to changes.
Connect with Suneera Madhani:
Resources mentioned:

Transcript

[Intro]

A.J. Lawrence:
Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode. Today we’re going to have a lot of fun, sort of diving into one great entrepreneurial journey from building an incredibly successful company, selling out to private equity, and then coming back for more pain and torp, no, for another great company. But really what’s kind of cool is servicing a lot of pain we have in small businesses around business credit and understanding sort of the risk around our own businesses for financial institutions. Before I get in, I promised the team I would ask. Please go to the site and sign up for our newsletter if you’re listening to this episode. This way you’ll be the first to know when we have amazing guests, like today’s guest, Suneera Madhani on the show.

Suneera, thank you so much for coming.

Suneera Madhani:
A.J., I’m so excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

A.J. Lawrence:
This is fun. I mean, I was just saying to you right before we started, I got lost in some detail on your site. For one, the features you do for small businesses, besides being able to develop kind of a financial risk profile for businesses, was this ability to sort of track the different IRS, but even more importantly, state and local fees, taxes, all the different things that are due. Because if you’re doing business in multiple states or if you have, now as most of us have, employees all over the place, not in just one location, you have all sorts of requirements of what you have to update, keep track of, and pay to lovely different government agencies all over the place.

And it drives me crazy. And seeing that, I was just like, oh my God, this is amazing. And I know that’s just a teeny, teeny, teeny part of what you guys are doing, but I was just like, you had me at hello moment right there. I was just like, right there, all right, done. How do I sign up? So thank you so much for coming on. You built Stax, you sold it to private equity, and now you have Worth utilizing AI to kind of have a better understanding of the underwriting opportunity around small businesses. Where do you see yourself as an entrepreneur these days? I mean, you’re doing some incredible things. You’ve had a great growth. So where are you?

Suneera Madhani:
Thank you, A.J. No, it’s been such a journey. I mean, ten years of building the first company, and it was not easy to scale from absolutely nothing. I was the founder of the company, CEO for ten years, grew it from zero to selling at north of a billion. And so that was a really, really hard, long journey in building the first company. I didn’t go to CEO school. I am a minority woman living out of Orlando, Florida, and it’s very hard to raise capital, especially for the amount of capital that I needed to scale the businesses. So just so many challenges along the way. And I’m sure we can unpack that. Like, if we just started there, that would take up the rest, like the entirety of the show.

But nonetheless, was able to really power through, right? And to build a company beyond 8 figures, we, and when I say we, I have two amazing co-founders at Stax. My brother and I, we’re co-founders and built the company together. And it was just so fun building with family, and we were young and hungry, and there was a lot of things that also went right in our way. But so many lessons as well that we look back and we want to apply into the next venture that we do, and just even how we’ve gotten here.

I’ll share a little bit. We were a financial services company at Stax. We did credit card processing. We did it very differently. We were the first subscription based credit card processor. It was novel, it was disruptive, it was high speed, high growth, and it was the fastest train I’ve ever been on.

And every day I showed up for a job that was harder than the one I had yesterday. So lots of amazing experience in that journey. I did sell the company during our series D round and did a majority recap to private equity, and we did multiple rounds of funding. For the entrepreneurs listening in the room, take multiple bites of the apple. It was a successful journey. It was not just successful for the co-founders, but it was also very successful for our community. We had a lot of angel investors, local investors, and our team.

We made over 30 millionaires upon the transaction. It was massive for Florida. We were the first unicorn out of Orlando. So big journey. And I literally thought when you would ask me this question, because I think we were scheduled for the show like a year and a half ago. So if you would ask me that question of like, what’s next? I would say I’m sitting on a beach somewhere. I am not going into the office. I am relaxing, and I’m spending time at home with my two daughters. I have two young kids, Mila and Aana, who are seven and five. And that is where I’ll be. And here we are a year and a half later, and we launched a company post six months after exiting the company. And so it is wild. It is nuts, but this is the journey of most successful entrepreneurs, and it’s addicting. But when you see problems, it’s hard to unsee them and not want to solve them.

And one of the biggest challenges that we had or saw, one, we were not only serving small business, but we’ve been in small business. Like we are small business ourselves, like our company scaled, but lots of challenges in the financial credit worth of a small business. Everything is tied to my personal credit. Even scaling the business is really hard. Even understanding what is available to me as a business owner, there just isn’t that right communication between the products that are offered from financial institutions and how do they actually reach me and get to me. And then as a financial institution myself, we onboarded over 100,000 small businesses during the lifetime that I was there. And it was all manual and understanding of businesses on the other side was very cumbersome. And there was humans making all these decisions about someone, about the business’s credit worth. And we believe that there needed to be more standardization across this process. It wasn’t our challenge to fix. That wasn’t the company that I was building at that time.

But just as we have our personal credit, as that defines the success of our personal consumer health, we can go buy a car, A.J. Today you go to the dealership, you go to the Range Rover dealership or the Lexus dealership, in minutes, you will know and they will know and they can underwrite you to say, what is your loan? What is the interest rate that you’re going to pay? What is your down payment? And even if you qualify to buy the Range Rover or not, like immediately because we have standardization on the personal credit side. There is no standardization of the business credit score in existence. So there have been companies that have tried to, large players, Dun & Bradstreet, Equifax, you know, the large data houses, but the timing was never right. And businesses weren’t digitized historically. And so now post Covid, we had this amazing revolution of standardization of the digital financial way that businesses do business.

Even the IRS, you were talking about that IRS feature that you love, we’re now able to pay our taxes online. Payroll is fully online. We’re using tools like QuickBooks, all ERP systems, like everything is now digital. And guess what? All of these major tools have open APIs that have all of this financial data that is available on the business. And so, it was just the right timing of the convergence of AI with data to ingest the right financial pieces of the business in minutes, in seconds, be able to really understand the 360 financial profile of a small business. And so we partnered with Equifax. We’ve been in stealth over the last year now.

So literally immediately after we left, we were kind of sitting on this idea, and as soon as we started talking about it, we’re like, yep, we got to go do it. So Sal and I back at it again, but this time around, second stage founder, had a lot of success, I was able to pick up the right phone calls. And that is like, I pretty much skipped the first seven years of our journey in building the first company. And we’re here with the right partners, the right seats at the table. And so what’s next is really, for me as an entrepreneur is doing this again. Doing it with a confidence that I didn’t have the first time around, doing it with the experience that I was learning and almost making my own mistakes, but this time doing it more strategically. I think we’ll do it faster than we did it the first time around. But also this time, I really want to, you know, we all say it that we want to enjoy the journey, but it’s really hard when you’re really in it.

And I really do want to enjoy the journey differently this time while keeping the freedom of time with my family and other things as well, kind of keeping that at the forefront while building. So I’ll keep you posted on how it’s going to go in six to eight months. But that’s the plan.

A.J. Lawrence:
You had this underserved market, but I think what was really interesting from what you were just saying was you have this plan now to do it differently and to support your own life in a better way as an entrepreneur. And I know you’re still trying to figure it out, and we’ll have you back in eight months and we can kind of see how well you’ve done. But what has kind of gone into that thought process compared to the first effort? Because from all intents purposes, you were on a rocket ship as an entrepreneur. Maybe you didn’t sleep and maybe you were miserable, but the entrepreneurial journey is that. So now, as you’re looking at this, how did this come about? Whats going into the thought process?

Suneera Madhani:
I think thats a very fair question and I would be lying to you if I had a perfect answer for it. I think it’s more about intentionality on the things that I did miss and the things that I did prioritize. I mean, I know how to build it. I built a rocket ship once before. I do think that when you go about it the second time, like literally always say, if you can do it once, you can do it better. So like, I know I can do it better. I’ve already done it once, I could do it again.

If I do it again, I could do it better. Right? That’s the thing. I know I can do it better. So what better looks like for me, it’s not the speed of the company. I feel comfortable in my lane as a CEO. I feel comfortable in my lane in the business strategy, the execution part of business. I’ve always been maniacally focused on execution. So even over the last ten years in building the first company, I was heads down in doing that.

This time around, I want to leverage business even differently. Like everything was one to one, singular from a relationship standpoint. Like I felt like I had to go build everything myself. This time around, I really want to leverage partnerships. I really want to leverage things that weren’t I’m naturally great at that. There were parts of it in the business that of course I was able to utilize, like building a team and we did acquisitions. And a lot of those things I was able to leverage. But now I have the knowledge to know what my superpowers actually were, and I feel more confident in those.

So how can I apply? And I think that when you have that level of confidence in your own self, things look differently. It’s not that I wasn’t confident the first time around and built a widely successful business, but I think as a woman, specifically in such a male dominant, it’s a man’s world. The financial services, it is a man’s world. Tech is a man’s world. Venture capital is a man’s world. So I felt like I was constantly trying to prove myself to everyone and taking that off of my shoulder, just taking that off of it, I think it just allows more freedom to get to play and do what I know that I’m going to do best. So that’s one component of that confidence that I do believe will allow some more of that flexibility.

It wasn’t that I didn’t have it, I wasn’t able to feel like I could play. I had to play by these exact rules because I needed that seat, or I was trying to get that seat at the table. But now I’ve kind of I don’t want that seat at the table. I’m building my own table. And this time around, I get to be strategic with who I partner with. I get to be strategic. We’re talking about investors, right? What are the things that first time around, it was hard raising capital.

Less than 2% of venture capital, even in 2023, went to female founded companies. Like, it is absurd. It is absurd. It is hard. And it’s not because I didn’t have a great business model, a scalable model. It wasn’t that. I mean, the network was building, but it’s part of what was happening. Now, this time around, I haven’t done any venture like done the road show. Or I’ve picked up a few calls and I’ve already made everybody money. And so this time around, I didn’t have to go figure out how to go get capital. And with that, I could be more strategic with who I allow in on my cap table.

What are the value alignments? Like now I get to pick. It’s one thing that I would say, like I’ve listened to so many entrepreneur books, podcasts, all the stuff, and it’s like pick value alignment and make sure that it’s the right partner on the other side and blah, all of that stuff, which is great, but beggars can’t be choosers. It’s great if I’m a white man that’s getting capital and I’ve got all of the people in front of me willing to give me capital. It wasn’t like that the first time around. And so I want to be honest here. This time around, I can be choosy and I can ensure that it’s with the right value alignment and things like that, which then allows for peace of mind as a CEO, because I’m not proving myself in another way. And then now also being intentional with my family life as a woman in this space previously and even pre-Covid, right? Like I was pregnant fundraising. My co-founder, his wife was pregnant at the same time. Jacques’s wife was pregnant at the same time. But no one would ask him about what was going to happen to the business. And so now it doesn’t even matter.

Like, I feel like I can incorporate my family in a different way without having to feel like I need to share that I do have other passions in my life besides being a CEO. I’m just being honest. So I do think it’s different. It’s going to be different because I’m coming from a place of experience now. I’m coming from a place of success now. And I’ve got the right strategic people around me who believe in the jockey just as much as the business this time.

A.J. Lawrence:
You know what is so powerful about this is you talked about early on, you did everything you need to do. You know, the kind of I’m going to throw this up over my shoulders and whatever it is, I’ll carry it across the line. But in that process, you said you better understood your superpowers, but it took you to actually have this previous success that now you can create this environment that you could use your superpowers rather than channeling. I always say it’s like you got to walk the walk, and act act, even if it’s totally an act of how people expect you to be to do things. Now you get to do this, that in itself is amazing. But let’s talk about how you discovered your superpowers and now how you think that’s going to allow you to better create something that will help you go on to achieve what you want to do, to go do what you want to do.

Suneera Madhani:
I mean, I don’t know if there’s like a specific process that I could say of like here is this process that, you know, I then was able to identify. But I would say it’s really leaning into what I love to do, right? Like, I do think that there are things that what we call our zones of genius. They don’t just happen because, we’d love to do them also, right? So there’s things that you’re good at, there’s things that you’re great at, and when you have things that you’re great at and you love to do those things, that’s your superpower. For me, that’s always been I can connect with anyone. I love connecting with people.

I naturally build relationships and I genuinely care. And I do think that that is my superpower. I’m very authentic in the conversations that I have with individuals, whether that be from a customer all the way to an investor, to whoever it is in between, or it’s my the cleaning lady. And so I do feel like connecting with people is a strength. And that was a great strength of mine as CEO and building a company that needed to do, you know, I needed to build teams. There wasn’t a week that I’ve been an entrepreneur that I haven’t hired somebody new on a Monday, like at the record, I’ve had to hire. So that in and of itself of like, convincing people, and I’m inspiring. I can get people to really like want to run through a wall, that’s a superpower.

And so I know my strengths are like in these categories. I love building brands. Like that is something I have a great vision for building brands and brands that can scale. And everything that I touch, like it’s not just about the brand aesthetic, but the right message, the right audience, and so go-to-market is also a huge strength of mine. You could build the most amazing products but if nobody knows about it, that’s not going to work either. And I think there are things that are naturally, I was leaning in as CEO, right, because you get to play and do every hat in your organization.

So I was from the janitor to the CEO, we can all relate to that as entrepreneurs. But it’s really thinking about what are the hats that you love to wear? And this time around, I get to choose to wear those hats first and then hire. Not that I can’t do the other roles because I know that, and that’s the confidence in this time. I’ve already played every role. I’ve played every role in the organization but this time around, I know where I want to play. And I think that that will also make me happier. I think that there’s this happiness factor that is part of when you love what you do and you get to do that. And being the CEO is hard. It’s the hardest job and it’s the most underappreciated job by everyone.

And especially like even as much as you care for your teams and all the stuff that you do, at the end of the day, you’re alone. You know, you are literally alone. And so finding happiness and at least that the things that you love to do is really important. So I feel for all my co-CEO’s out there, I feel you. This is hard. Entrepreneur sh*t is what it is.

A.J. Lawrence:
Yeah, it is. And what I think is really powerful about what you’re talking about is, I’ve been in the process of trying to buy a company and I left the altar this time. Numbers and there were a few red flags around truthfulness of the seller. But one of the things a coach of mine suggested I read was the Six Working Geniuses. So you’re talking about zones of genius, working geniuses. It was very interesting because, okay, yeah, this lined up to how I saw the world and when I took the test after reading the book, but it wasn’t just to do the things you love.

It was to find the right balances. You can do the other things too, but you can’t just do the one thing because you’ll burn out also if you do. So it’s like, it seems like you found more balance. Yes, you’ve had success, but I think you’ve had to earn that success. So it doesn’t matter the outcome. The billion dollar exit is a beautiful outcome. And God, yeah, that is truly the success metric we all entrepreneurs all measure ourselves against. But it really is the effort you put consistently over this period of time to get there.

Outcome, great, but it’s more that effort that went in to do that and get to this point where now you can bring this energy to bear that just feeds you and lets you come further.

Suneera Madhani:
But you know, A.J., I kind of, I wish like the advice that I would like look back and give myself, I’ve had it all along. I didn’t need to have a transaction to validate it. So a lot of this stuff is in our heads as well. There’s no reason why I didn’t lean into my zones in my second year as an entrepreneur. Whatever stage you’re at, and I hear you on earning the stripes, execution is important and you’ve got to play all the roles. Like, you’re not going to be successful.

Like, those are, that’s clean sheets. If you’re not showing up for that, you’re not going to even be in business by the end of this year, right? Execution is everything. But I do look back and I do think that I let the outside, the world, get to me and what success should look like versus actually defining what success for me looks like. And I was also on this like next milestone, next milestone, next milestone. And it’s great and you look up and it’s like a decade later and all of my 20 like literally between I started the company at 25 to 35, that whole part of my life is a blur without, like besides the company I had. And I was very present. It’s not like I wasn’t present for my family, but that was it. Like, that was it. Like my family, and it was the business, and that’s it. And I look back and I’m like, what are other things that I care about? I don’t even know. I don’t even have any other hobbies.

After the series D, which was 2021, and the valuation wasn’t like a BS value of like, oh, it’s a tech company, here’s the multiple. We were north of 100 million in revenue so it was a multiple of our revenue. After doing the series D, receiving the unicorn, then I get a board plan that’s like, here’s like the next, you know, we got to take it from one to two. And at that moment, I think that was it for me. And it didn’t have to take that, but the party goes away, right? Like you work your entire life towards whatever every entrepreneur is working for. And yeah, that lasted a month of the celebrations and all of the things and the press, and it made history. I’m one of the only minority women to ever do that. We’re first out of like so many first and it was such a proud moment, for sure, for everyone that built this company, but it goes away. And then you’re left with, okay, here’s the next goal.

And you really have to intrinsically check with yourself to say, like, what is- and this is where the why is important. As much as we want to keep sight of that, you lose that during the process because you’re chasing and you’re chasing and you’re chasing. And so I do, right after that moment, I did what every entrepreneur does post an exit like that. I would took my family to Europe, did this sabbatical thing, got my mindset right. But it didn’t have to take that, what I want to share with entrepreneurs. And this time around, and that’s why I came back. And people are like so quick, how fast we’re doing this. We’re doing this again.

But I do feel I’m coming in with just a different level of clarity this time. And so it feels exciting and I almost feel like it is better. I earned my stripes but what I want to share with the audience here today, if I could share a lesson with you, is you have what it takes today. Tune into what success looks like for you. Define success in your role, what that looks like for you. Build the things around you and you can design your company in that way as well, versus letting everybody else tell you how it should be.

A.J. Lawrence:
Yeah, you’re building in on your own things and outcomes. Yes, we all need to make money, and lots of money is very nice. But at the end of the day, it’s the decisions we make along it and the continuation of those decisions, doing something we want. And it seems like- not seems, it’s obvious from proof, but at the end of the day, it’s still that you went through this growth period and you’re kind of creating this actually quickly. Where did you go in “sabbatical” as you said? In Europe, where did you live?

Suneera Madhani:
Oh my God. Well, it was like five and a half. It was good. It was a great trip with the family. We did Portugal, so we did Portugal, and it was beautiful.

A.J. Lawrence:
Yeah, I used to live in southern Spain for five years after I sold And yeah, Europ, it can be very, very nice. It’s like, wow, calmer. There are issues, there are things, but it’s so much calmer. And the food and the wine.

Suneera Madhani:
Everyone is so calm everywhere else besides here.

A.J. Lawrence:
Yes, there are some things, but okay. So you now get to kind of move into this, building in this the way that you see is right. Let’s actually talk about that why. You’re coming back, you want to do this your way. Are you finding your why evolving as you’re going through? Because you’ve done it once, obviously you learn so much from this.

You had the exit, you had the nice break in Portugal, your children are growing. Is your why sort of evolving as you deal with now Worth growing and becoming so interesting? Or is it sort of you had the why and you’re building it around it? How is this sort of happening?

Suneera Madhani:
Yeah, that’s actually a really great question. I think your why can evolve and I think that your why can be different for your personal why and it can be different for your business why. And I think sometimes we try to bring it all together, and it doesn’t have to be because I think every one of us is motivated differently. Right? So my why is different than my co-founder’s why, personally probably, right? Like, that’s okay. And so we have to tune into what our personal whys are, and then there’s the business why, and the business needs its why. So we all need to really rally around this mission of the company.

And so I do feel very clear in both of those whys. For Worth, I want honestly every woman in business to know her worth. And women are left out of the financial ecosystem. People of color are left out of the financial ecosystem. And this product is not just serving women and underrepresented founders, it’s serving all businesses. But by building this product, I know I’m able to change the way business is done. Building a business credit score and ensuring that there’s standardization by all financial institutions to view a business with data and not through human decision-making is going to change the way business is done.

That is what our partners believe. This is why Equifax is also strategically aligning with us. Like everyone is rallied around decision making through data. But I know that if I complete this task, it’s actually going to change the way business is done for women and minorities in business. There is this beautiful effect and I get to build this because of that selfishly on my selfish why. I feel like I’m not done. I have this rigor and I want to take a company public. I want to go build a brand that is a household name.

And although we built something really big at Stax, it was an enterprise solution and didn’t touch all consumers. So I want to build a legacy brand. I do feel like I want to lean in this time and do it on my terms. I want to do it strategically. I want to show that I can do it again. Like there’s just these personal that’s separate from what the company’s why is. But that’s fueling me as well.

And I don’t need to prove myself. I don’t need the financial success anymore. It’s not about the dollar. It’s about freedom this time. For me, freedom is my why. And I want to play and I want to have fun. And I love marketing. The face of business has changed so much in 2024.

Entrepreneurship has changed. And none of the financial service, like even we couldn’t underwrite creators or we couldn’t underwrite different styles of businesses like new business. If you’re not in business for three years, no one wants to touch you as an institution. That’s not how we’re going to scale services and products. That needs to change. But if I can power that and give decision making to all these companies who want to do better business with businesses, I think I can really change the way this landscape is done. For entrepreneurs who can relate to me right now, you love solving stuff. This is the biggest problem I’ve ever encountered and it’s the biggest problem I can go solve. So that is fun.

And I think entrepreneurship, like why it’s addicting, it’s a game. I want to get to the next level, I want to get to the next level. And it’s like you do it all over again. So just because you win Mario Kart, you don’t stop playing the game. You get back into it. And so I think like the fun of it is what’s really exciting on my personal side. And it’s a big problem and I want to go solve it.

And then on the business why, it’s needed. And if I can provide this and get all the data together, 360, no one has done it. There’s not a single 360 profile of a business, it’s insane. We have it, and I’m super excited to share it with all of you in the audience today because we just launched. So when this episode is going to drop, the Worth score is available. You can go to worthscore.com, you can go get your business score today, so you can go see how institutions view your profile immediately. There’s so much value in knowing your business’s worth. And so I’m just so excited about this product and this brand, and I get to do it again, and that’s a privilege.

A.J. Lawrence:
Cool. Well, let’s then talk about you, because you were talking about your why and the business why and kind of having them similar but different. How are you looking to define what success is going to be for yourself? You’re on your second rocket ship, yeah, I will call this a rocket ship because it is very, very cool. The branding is very on point, very strong. And like I said already, you had me at hello with just like the updates on filings.

Suneera Madhani:
Real, it’s super real. Success for me, what does success look like? You know, I’m going to put more homework into this, but for me it truly is, I was telling my business coach this last week, and I’m like really trying to stay true to myself this time. I really want to ensure I have the boundaries, like work-life boundaries as best as I possibly can. And that’s important to me. So I think success will still look like me being able to incorporate life into all the things, and that looks like freedom of time, right?

It’s not always going to be perfect and we’re going to work at it. But that is something that I will define as success, is being able to simplify, even in the business. I think that we can choose to do so many things as product. We can grow into so many avenues and assets. but I just want to keep it simple so that we can keep our company simple and simplified. We don’t need to serve every vertical from a financial. We’re serving financial institutions on the enterprise product.

This product can work for insurance companies, all kinds of companies that do underwriting for business. And eventually we can get there. But I’m really just trying to stay focused in our lane. So that’s something that I think success will look like for me, is really focusing on the niche, on who we’re selling to, simplifying life for myself, getting those boundaries in place of freedom of time. I think that’s how I’ll define success. I don’t think this time around it’s on how much money we raise or how many employees I have or what the value is. I think that will all come because I know it will come.

A.J. Lawrence:
Well, I mean, even there, simple is so much harder. As someone who, and I haven’t had even closest to the growth levels you have, but every time growth really accelerated, it was sort of like, okay, yeah, sure, we’ll do that. We’ll do that. Dude. It’s like, why are we taking people’s garbage out? Okay, whatever. We’ll take care of that. Simple takes work.

Suneera Madhani:
Simple is harder work. But you know why it takes work? Discipline, right? Simple is hard because it requires no, the word no. And we as CEO’s are used to doing everything for everyone and saying yes to everything for everyone. So the no is what is not part of our DNA. And that is why simple is hard.

Because we’re trying to please and do and to get the revenues and to get all the stuff. So discipline and the power of no is why it’s hard. And I’m not saying that I’m going to be perfect at it. So, A.J., we should check in and I’m going to hold you as my accountability partner. That’s what I’m going to do this time for.

A.J. Lawrence:
I agree. Academy partners are very, very important. All right. Well, Suneera, this was great. And I am so excited to see this because one, I’m excited to get my own score for my company. But hopefully by then, hopefully in this episode, I’ll have a brand new acquisition. But we’ll see where this goes. It would actually be really cool to see what happens to a score when you do these types of things and also how to plan. All right, sorry, I’m already geeking out on what you’re doing.

Suneera Madhani:
It’s really cool.

A.J. Lawrence:
Let me do that off. But no, Suneera, thank you so much for coming on. This is really cool and I can’t wait to see how this grows and really, I can’t wait to just use it. So thank you so much for coming on the show.

Suneera Madhani:
Thank you, A.J., and thanks for everyone listening. I really enjoyed our conversation. It was very just, it was awesome. And thanks for having me. And I encourage all of you to go get your score. It’s worthscore.com.

A.J. Lawrence:
Yep. Oh, thank you.

Suneera Madhani:
Yeah. And you can follow me online. I love supporting entrepreneurs. Yeah, I love supporting entrepreneurs. You can find me on like every social channel at Suneera Madani, so my first and last name, and you can find us at worth score online as well. So shoot me a DM, say hello. I’ve got a podcast called CEO School. It’s a women’s empowerment podcast. So any women listening in the room, definitely come check out CEO School. We’re having amazing conversations with female founders every Monday. So I can’t wait for you ladies to tune in.

A.J. Lawrence:
I will make sure that all goes into the show notes, into the email when this episode launches, and of course, in our socials. Thank you. I’m so sorry, I forgot to ask you that. Thank you again for coming on. Everyone go check out your Worth score. Matter of fact, might as well post it here when we put it in. Let’s see, it would be fun to do, like see who can do it because I know I’m worried, like, oh, yeah, I know I have some tax issues I have to deal with, so it would be fun to see. I can’t wait to see what goes into this.

Suneera Madhani:
I can’t wait to see what people, if they’re going to share it, I think that’s really awesome. Amazing. Thank you, A.J.

A.J. Lawrence:
All right, everyone, have a great day. Thank you for listening and we’ll talk with you soon. Bye-bye.